(Credit: Muscle & Fitness Hers Magazine cover)
Muscle & Fitness Hers magazine unpublished at least two blog posts after discovering they were plagiarized, Media Bistro’s Fishbowl NY reported.
Weird thing was the byline for the stolen text was the editor-in-chief Mona Muresan who soon blamed a “freelancer” she hired to be her ghost writer.
On August 5, Muresan published a statement tiled “Apologies” explaining how the blogposts were written for her and posted under her name.
The apology doesn’t say exactly how many blogposts were plagiarized, but Fishbowl NY tracked down two blogposts unpublished in the Muscle & Fitness Hers Community section.
The apology, signed by Muresan, says,
“It has come to my attention that some of the Community posts shared under my name were taken from articles on other websites. While I’ve been traveling, I enlisted the help of a freelancer who assisted me with my social media and I didn’t know that these posts were plagiarized. I apologize to the Muscle & Fitness Hers readers, the writers of these original articles, the sites these were lifted from, and the bodybuilding social community. We hold editorial in high standards at our magazine and on our website and I will make sure this doesn’t happen again. Thank you for your understanding and support of Hers.”
Fishbowl NY compared two posts with Muresan’s byline published in the last month with the articles they stole from. One post stole from nextavenue.org and the second was lifted from streetdirectory.com. Both articles lifted verbatim from the original sources.
iMediaEthics also put the text from the Google cache into Google. One of the posts lifted the entire article from LifeWithoutPants.com, which posted its article back in 2012. The only original thing about the article is the last line: “Try it, it will change your life! XO”
Below see the whole text of the article. iMediaEthics highlighted in yellow all the plagiarized content.
The second article found by Fishbowl NY plagiarized from a few different sources including Next Avenue, Street Directory, and Positive Health, iMediaEthics found.
iMediaEthics has written to Muresan for more information including if Muscle & Fitness Hers reviewed all of the freelancers’ work and how many blog posts were plagiarized. We also asked if it is a regular practice to hire freelancers to ghost write content under other people’s bylines.
Has anyone found the ghost writer yet? I’m sure this person doesn’t exist, but if she does – and that assertion is challenged – I would think the GW would have a decent amount to say about it. Also, did American Media conduct their own investigation into the matter? It’s really appalling that a large organization such as that would hire this person anyway, considering she doesn’t appear to have the chops to edit a newsstand magazine of this size! This sort of thing is exactly what happens when people are plucked from outside journalism and haven’t endured hours of journalistic ethics courses.